Thursday, December 22, 2016

We're sneaking in a little holiday gift at the end of the year: two new beta releases for developers to try out with the latest version of Angular.

material components with a custom theme and RTL text

In March, we gave you a first preview of the new Angular Material components. Today's beta release of @angular/material includes 22 UI components written for the latest Angular: button, button‑toggle, card‑list, chips, checkbox, dialog, grid‑list, icon, input, menu, progress‑bar, progress‑spinner, radio‑button, select, sidenav, slide‑toggle, slider, snackbar, textarea, toolbar, and tooltip. It also provides support for accessibility, custom themes, and RTL text. For documentation and examples, see material.angular.io.

Also out in beta today, the new @angular/flex-layout package is a general-purpose flex-based layout library for use in any Angular application later than version 2.4. It provides a responsive engine and API to easily define how UI layouts should update as viewport sizes change with orientation across different display devices. The HTML API makes it trivial to quickly arrange (and auto-resize) web page component layouts. In Angular 1.x, layout tools were included as part of Angular Material. With flex-layout, we have made layout a standalone library, decoupled from the UI components. Learn more about the flex-layout beta here.

Whether you're building a new app, or upgrading from a legacy Angular 1.x app that needs Layout and Angular Material APIs, these components will help you to quickly build a beautiful and performant UI consistent with Google's Material Design spec.

What does beta mean?

We've built all of the core UI components that most applications will need. Start using these libraries, and give us feedback on GitHub.

We don’t plan to make any large API changes before exiting beta, however we’ll make changes based on feedback we receive during the beta process.

What's still in the works?

For Angular Material, developers can expect other advanced components (e.g. data-table, date-picker), and typography support. Both libraries will see ongoing bug fixes and feature improvements.
For users on Angular Material 1.x, a new release is expected in early 2017 with bug fixes and security improvements.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Angular version 2.4.0 - stability-interjection - is now available. This is a minor release following our announced adoption of Semantic Versioning, meaning that it contains no breaking changes and that it is a drop-in replacement for 2.x.x.

What's new?

This release updates our dependencies to the recently announced RxJS 5 stable

For the complete list of features and bugfixes please see the changelog.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

This is a guest blog post by Juri Strumpflohner. Juri is a full-stack developer, architect and tech lead with a passion for frontend development, especially Angular. Juri writes technical articles on his personal blog and is the author of some online video courses. He also likes to engage and help the Angular community on Twitter, so follow him for more interesting news and articles around Angular and frontend web development. Juri was an attendee of NG-BE, Belgium’s first Angular conference last week and did a better job covering our announcements than we would have done, so we are cross-posting his blog post here.

Update: This blog was updated by the Angular team on 2017-01-26 to reflect the latest naming standards.
At the 8th and 9th of December 2016 was NG-BE, Belgium’s first Angular conference. Igor Minar (Angular lead dev) attended as the keynote speaker with some interesting announcements regarding Angular’s release schedule. Please read the entire post, there are a couple of important things.
Igor was extremely open and transparent about the announcement and even about the way of presenting it. He basically created the presentation openly the day before the conference:

I'll be conducting a major open source experiment at @ngbeconf tonight at 10pm downstairs in the main room. Come if you want to participate.

Angular uses SEMVER

Back in September when the new Angular was finally released, the Angular team also announced they will switch to Semantic Versioning (SEMVER).
As the name already explains, Semantic Versioning is all about adding meaning to version numbers. This allows developers to not only reason about any upgrade we do, but we can even let tools such as NPM do it in a automatic and safe manner for us.
A semantic version consists of three numbers:

Whenever you fix a bug and release it, you increase the last number, if a new feature is added, you increase the second number and whenever you release a breaking change you increase the first number.

“A breaking change happens whenever you as a developer and consumer of a library, have to step in and adjust your code after a version upgrade.”

So what does this mean for the Angular team? As with every evolving piece of software, breaking changes will occur at some point. For example, giving a compiler error for existing application bugs that went unnoticed with the previous compiler version, anything, that will break an existing application when upgrading Angular, requires the team to bump the major version number.
Just to be clear, as also Igor mentioned in his talk. Right now, even just upgrading Angular’s TypeScript dependency from v1.8 to v2.1 or v2.2 and compile Angular with it, would technically cause a breaking change. So they’re taking SEMVER very, very seriously.

Breaking changes don’t have to be painful!

People that have been following the Angular community for a while, definitely know what I’m talking about. We went from Angular 1 to Angular 2, and it was a total breaking change, with new APIs, new patterns. That was obvious: ultimately Angular 2 was a complete rewrite. (Even though there are upgrade options for you available)
Changing from version 2 to version 4, 5, … won’t be like changing from Angular 1. It won’t be a complete rewrite, it will simply be a change in some core libraries that demand a major SEMVER version change. Also, there will be proper deprecation phases to allow developers to adjust their code.
Internally at Google, the Angular team uses a tool for handling automatic upgrades, even of breaking changes. This is still something that has to be planned in more detail, but the team is working hard on making this tool generally available, most probably in 2017 in time for version 5.

It’s just “Angular”

As you might have already guessed, the term “Angular 2” is also kind of deprecated once we get to version 4, 5 etc. That said, we should start naming it simply “Angular” without the version suffix.

“It’s just #angular”

Also, we should start avoiding GitHub/NPM libraries prefixed with ng2- or angular2-.

Naming guidelines

Basically from now on, you should name versions 2.0.0 or later of Angular simply “Angular”. Try to avoid using the version number, unless it is really necessary to disambiguate.

Three simple guidelines:

Use “Angular” for versions 2.0.0 and later (e.g. “I’m an Angular developer”, “This is an Angular meetup”, “The Angular ecosystem is growing quickly”)

Use "AngularJS" to describe versions 1.x or earlier

Use the version number “Angular 4.0” "Angular 2.4" when needed to talk about a specific release (e.g. when talking about a newly introduced feature - “This is an introduction to feature X, introduced in Angular 4”, “I’m proposing this change for Angular 5”)

Use full semver version when reporting a bug (e.g. “This issue is present as of Angular 2.3.1”)

All the docs - even for AngularJS - will be aligned to this in the coming weeks. Also in blog articles, courses, books, if you are targeting a very specific version of Angular for a reason, consider adding a header line which states that:

“This article uses Angular v2.3.1.”

That helps avoid confusion for your readers, especially when you are writing about specific APIs.

Why not version 3 then?

The core Angular libraries live in one single GitHub repository at github.com/angular/angular. All of them are versioned the same way, but distributed as different NPM packages:

Due to this misalignment of the router package’s version, the team decided to go straight for Angular v4. In this way again, all the core packages are aligned which will be easier to maintain and help avoid confusion in the future.
Also it is important to understand how Angular is being used and integrated inside Google (Igor speaks about this here in his keynote). All Google applications use Angular version equal to the current GitHub’s master branch of the Angular repository. Whenever a new commit lands in master, it will be integrated into Google’s single, giant mono-repo, where also other products such as Maps, Adsense etc. live. As a consequence all of the projects using Angular internally at Google will run their extensive test suites against this new version. This makes the team very confident to cut a new release, since it will contain the exact combination of versions of Angular packages that have been already battle tested inside Google. Thus, having aligned versions totally makes sense and makes it easier to maintain them over time, which in turn helps the team be more productive in releasing new features.

Tentative release schedule

The fact that breaking changes will arrive, doesn’t mean they will arrive every other week. The Angular team committed to time based releases that occur in three cycles:

patch releases every week,

3 monthly minor release after each major release and

a major release with easy-to-migrate-over breaking changes every 6 months.

The next 3 months will be dedicated to finalizing Angular 4.0.0.

After Angular 4.0.0, this will be the tentative schedule for further releases:

Video: See the announcement yourself

Conclusion

There are two main important messages here:

don’t worry about version numbers

we do need to evolve Angular in order to avoid another Angular 1 to Angular 2 change, but we should do it together as a community in a transparent, predictable and incremental way.

Also, I’d like to thank Igor for being so open at presenting this data, especially since he knows what a sensitive topic breaking changes are and have been in the past. This means a lot and I hope that the community will realize why all these changes are good for everyone involved.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

AngularJS 1.6.0 - rainbow-tsunami

Release Announcement

Continuing our development and support of Angular 1, we are announcing the next significant release, 1.6.0, which has been in development since May this year.

In this release we have added a number of useful features that should improve the developer experience and we have tightened up the security of Angular 1 even further. We have also removed a handful of deprecated features that makes the codebase easier to maintain and in many cases improves performance.

New Features

Here are the most significant new features available in 1.6.0. Check out the changelog for more detail.

Inheriting ngModelOptions

When defining model options using the ngModelOptions directive, you can now choose to inherit options from ancestor ngModelOptions directives. This means that developers can centralise common model options rather than repeating themselves across all their HTML.

You can see examples of what you can do with this new feature in Todd Motto's recent blog post.

Alignment with jQuery 3

jQuery 3 was released in June this year and contains some changes that left our own jqLite implementation out of sync. In this release we have changed jqLite so that it matches the behaviour of jQuery 3.

Controller binding pre-assignment

We no longer pre-assign bindings onto instances of directive controllers before calling their constructors. This behaviour was not in keeping with how JavaScript object instantiation works and also prevented developers from using native JavaScript classes where available.

Now all directive controllers should use $onInit to initialize their state, where the bindings are guaranteed to be ready. This is also closer to the semantic of Angular 2 components.

This results in clearer Angular 1 templates and is more in keeping with how it is done in Angular 2.

Better support for range inputs

In Angular 1.5.x (from 1.5.10 and later) you need to manually opt-in to this support since the behaviour of native range inputs required a change to how ngModel handled updates to the value:

Angular 1.6 now fully supports <input type=range ng-model="..."> by default without having to opt-in.

It requires the model to be a number, and will set the model to a number.

It only supports setting minimum and maximum values via the min/max attributes.

It follows the browser behavior of never allowing an invalid value: when the browser converts an invalid value to a valid value, the the model is set to this new valid value.

Security Improvements

There have been a number of commits that have improved or clarified the security of Angular 1 applications. Here are some of the highlights.

Mozilla Addons

Due to some strengthening work we have done to make it more difficult to autobootstrap Angular in browser extensions, all versions of Angular from 1.5.9/1.6.0 onwards are now whitelisted as safe to use in Mozilla Addons.

Expression sandbox removal

In this version of Angular we have removed the Angular expression sandbox feature. Some developers were incorrectly using this in an attempt to prevent XSS attacks to their templates. To make it clear that this should not be relied upon in this way we have made the decision to remove it completely. A more detailed write up of the background, the decision and whether you need to do anything can be found in our previous blog post.

JSONP

JSONP is now secured by the $sce service, in the same way that other significant resources are in Angular 1. JSONP URLs must now be whitelisted or explicitly trusted before Angular will allow a request to the end point. Further the syntax for JSONP URLs is now more secure, by disallowing the JSON_CALLBACK from the URL template and requiring that the callback is provided via the jsonpCallbackParam config param for requests.

Other Changes

There are over 70 significant commits between 1.5 and 1.6. You can find a detailed list of all the changes, including bug fixes and performance improvements in our changelog.

Migrating from 1.5 to 1.6

While there are a number of breaking changes between 1.5 and 1.6, many only affect very rare corner cases. There are a few significant changes that you should be aware of and we have a comprehensive migration guide to ensure that your migration goes smoothly.

Previous Version Support

We believe that Angular 1.6 is now the best Angular 1 version out there and that you should update your applications to use it.

We continue to support Angular 1.2 with security patches as it is the last version of Angular to support Internet Explorer 8 and from now on Angular 1.5 will receive serious bug fixes and security patches.

Angular 1.6 will get regular non-breaking change releases over the next six months, and we will be aiming for the release of Angular 1.7 containing any necessary breaking changes by Summer 2017.

Thank you

As always the work on Angular 1 is a major collaborative effort between people both within and outside the Angular team. We hope that it continues to provide the solid application development platform that you have been relying on for over 7 years!

Angular version 2.3.0 - is now available. This is a minor release following our announced adoption of Semantic Versioning, meaning that it contains no breaking changes and that it is be a drop-in replacement for 2.x.x. This is the final minor release for 2.x.

What's new?

We're now releasing the first version of the Angular Language Service. This is a service that is designed to integrate with IDEs and provide error checking and type completion within Angular Templates. We've built this service independent of editor, but we will soon be releasing an initial set of bindings for VS Code.

Developers can now take advantage of object inheritance for components. Share or simplify component functionality by inheriting from a parent component.

The latest release of zone.js includes improved stack traces. You should see stack traces that are shorter and are zone-aware: